“Billy here picked it last month and it’s stored in that barn back of Dallas’s house.”
Mr. Jap had always grown a strain that he swore had been handed straight down from a great-great-grandmother who befriended an Indian woman who gave her some seed stock in return. The colorful red, black, orange, and yellow ears were small and perfectly shaped, “and them fools over’n Cary and North Raleigh’ll hang it on anything that opens or closes,” he told Daddy gleefully. “Hell, they even buy corn shocks and hay bales and stick ’em all over them fancy yards they got.”
He’d shaken his head at the folly of city folks, but he was happy to take their cash. And was evidently eager for more.
“Billy here and me go halves on it,” Mr. Jap told us now, which explained the larger crop.
“Billy Wall?” I asked the young man. “Troy Wall’s boy?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said shyly.
“I didn’t know your daddy farmed.”
“He don’t. But I’ve always wanted to ever since I was a little boy.”
Troy Wall had been five or six years ahead of me in school and this boy, about twenty I’d say, was his spitting image. “What’s your dad up to these days?” I asked.
“Oh, not much. He lays floor tile for Carpet Country when his back don’t act up on him. They got the contract to do all the houses in Mr. Sutterly’s new subdivision over on New Forty-Eight.”
Dick Sutterly was the developer who’d tried to buy the farm from Dallas.
Mr. Jap dropped his cigarette, ground it out with the toe of his brogan. “That’s the old Holland homeplace,” he said. “Used to be one of the prettiest farms around, yes, it was. And James Holland always had the best yield of sweet potatoes of any man in the township. It’s a downright sin to put houses on such mellow land.”
“Been mine, I’d have never sold it,” Billy said wistfully.
“Well, everybody ain’t as willing to work as hard as you, boy. No, they ain’t.” Mr. Jap shook his head. “I reckon some folks would sell their soul if you offered ’em enough.”
I didn’t know if he meant the Holland heirs or his daughter-in-law sitting in the jailhouse over in Dobbs, and for a minute I thought he was going to launch into a discussion of sin and redemption. Instead, our conversation turned to crops and the weather.
Billy had come over today to see if Mr. Jap wanted some help getting up his pumpkins, which the old man peddled out of the back of his pickup at the flea market. Otherwise, he was going to bring out a crew this week to ready another load of ornamental corn for market. I gathered that it was a matter of carefully pulling back the dried shucks, tying them in bunches of threes, and then packing them into crates. Mr. Jap thought they might have a thousand dozen all told.
“Been such a good year, I’m a mind to run a load up to Washington,” said Billy. “I think I can get a dollar and a half an ear up there.”
A couple of short rows were still standing next to the pumpkin patch. Although some of the colorful ears had been nibbled down to the cob by squirrels and coons or carried off by crows, we found more than a dozen nearly perfect specimens for Aunt Zell, who was in charge of decorations for the County Democratic Women’s November meeting. Kidd loaded them in the van while I tried to pay Mr. Jap, who put his hands in his pocket and said, “Even if it won’t Sunday, I couldn’t take no money from Kezzie’s girl. ’Sides, y’all better go on and get them fool dogs ’fore that rabbit takes ’em across the road.”
In the distance we could hear the dogs yipping like crazy, so I thanked him and climbed back in the van. We drove on around the edge of the big cornfield, through a stand of pines and straight across a fallow pasture, through chest-high hogweeds, cockleburs, and bright yellow camphorweeds till we could actually see the two pups.
Whatever they’d been chasing had gone to earth somewhere beneath the tumbledown outbuildings there on the edge of Mr. Jap’s farm. The young dogs were running in and out and underneath the sagging wall of an old log tobacco barn, trying to figure out exactly how to get at their quarry.
We hurried over to them and Kidd had to speak smartly to them before they’d listen long enough for us to each grab a collar while he snapped on the leads.
Shelters with dull tin roofs shedded off three sides of the barn, which had almost disappeared under a tangle of kudzu vines. Hundreds of tobacco sticks were bundled and stacked under one; five old wrecked vehicles, four cars and a pickup, were nosed up under the other two shelters. They were dirty and covered with bird droppings, but their windows weren’t broken and they didn’t seem to be as rusty as the half-dozen that had been left to the weather out behind the shelters.
“Well, would you look at this!” Kidd said. He ducked beneath the kudzu vines and walked around to the front of a sporty little car with a smashed-in rear. “A 1967 Ford Mustang. That was my first car.”
“Was it red, too?”
He nodded.
“First boy I ever went steady with drove an old Mustang. Candy-apple red.” (Benny Porter. He’d had great potential till that warm spring night when four of my brothers boxed us in with their cars and trucks at the drive-in.)
Kidd smiled as his hand touched the frisky little grille ornament. “Y’all make the horse buck?”
“Why, Mr. Chapin,” I drawled. “What kind of a young girl do you think I was?”
(My brothers had kept their eyes on the screen and didn’t say a single word, but poor old Benny was so intimidated that he would barely kiss me after that and we broke up before school was out.)
“I bet you were hell on wheels.”
I laughed as he caught my hand and pulled me to him. The pups yipped and strained against their leads.
They barked again and we heard a deep male voice say, “Can I help y’all with something?”
Standing out in the sunshine was a heavyset muscular man with a thick mop of straight brown hair just beginning to go gray. He had a strong nose and square chin and his mouth was curtained by a salt-and-pepper mustache that bushed out over his upper lip.
Kidd and I were at the rear of the shelter, in deep shadow, of course, and the man squinted against the bright sunlight, trying to make out our features. We still had our arms around each other and Kidd gave me an inquiring glance. When I shrugged my shoulders to show I didn’t recognize him, Kidd stepped forward, looping the leads around his hand so the over-friendly pups couldn’t jump up on the stranger.
The man wore sun-faded jeans and a brown leather vest over a blue plaid shirt. The big buckle on his belt was enameled green-and-white and shaped like the logo of a popular motor oil.
I took a longer, harder look and my heart sank straight to the bottom of my stomach as I mentally shaved off that thick straight mustache and lengthened the hair into a ponytail. And maybe it was my imagination, but I could almost feel a tingle in my left shoulder where I’d once carried the tattoo of a small black star. Cost me a bunch to get the damn thing lasered off. When this man turned his left hand, I saw the mate of my black star on his palm and I knew that if he took off his shirt, there’d be a red, white, and blue American flag on one deltoid and a pair of black-and-white checkered flags on the other. (Not to mention a couple of raunchy tattoos on more intimate parts of his anatomy.)
He had to be at least fifty now, but he squatted down on the heels of his cowboy boots as easily as a teenager and rubbed the dogs’ ears. Suspicion was still in his eyes. “Y’all ain’t friends of that Tig Wentworth, are you?”